Professor of Sanskrit, appended to it. The gist of it is very candidly expressed by Professor Wilson. Upon the whole,' he says, the result of this experiment-than which a fairer test could scarcely be devised-may be considered as establishing, almost definitively, the correctness of the valuation of the characters of these inscriptions. It is possible that further investigations may find something to alter or to add; but the greater portion, if not the whole, may be read with confidence. It is somewhat different with respect to the words of the language. The almost invariable concurrence of the translators, in the general sense of the several paragraphs, shows that they are agreed to give the same interpretation to a very considerable portion-if not the larger portion-of the vocabulary. At the same time the differences prove that much remains to be effected before the sense of every term can be confidently rendered.' Dean Milman and Mr. Grote say, 'Having gone through this comparison, the examiners certify, that the coincidence between the translations, both as to the general sense. and the verbal rendering, were very remarkable. In most parts there was a strong correspondence in the meaning assigned, and occasionally a curious identity of expression as to particular words. Where the versions differed very materially, each translator had, in many cases, marked the passage as one of doubtful or unascertained signification. In the interpretation of numbers, there was throughout a singular correspondence.' To this Sir J. G. Wilkinson adds, that the agreement between the translations was so great, as to render it unreasonable to suppose the interpretation could be arbitrary, or based on uncertain grounds,' and that it appears to him 'to be satisfactory, and to be the result of a sound principle, and not of arbitrary hypothesis.' We presume that these judgments will suffice for most unprejudiced minds; and, if they suggest the need of caution, they at least justify us in accepting the unanimous, or all but unanimous, decisions of our cuneiform scholars as making that near approach to moral certainty, against which it is idle to fence with suppositions of possible

error.

To exhibit in full the confirmations of Old Testament history, which Mr. Rawlinson in his 'Lectures' has gathered from the arrow-headed writing,-and his series, as we have already intimated, is by no means exhaustive,-would carry this paper to an inordinate length. Agreeably to the design of it, however, we mention some of the chief of them as they stand in the order of time.

It is not a little interesting to find the inscriptions shedding

Confirmations of the Pentateuch.

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light on that most venerable table of genealogies and raceaffinities contained in the tenth chapter of the Book of Genesis. Among the difficulties of the chapter, not an inconsiderable one is the statement, that Cush the Hamite was the father of Nimrod the Babylonian. How this could be, has been a weary puzzle with the critics; and, though Michaelis and others explained it by assuming the existence of an Asiatic as well as an African Ethiopia, the soundness of their theory was stoutly contested by scholars of the highest class, and the question seemed likely to remain permanently open. Bunsen denounces

in the strongest terms the idea of a Cush in Asia, and declares it to be the child of the despair' of its supporters. The inscriptions say he is wrong; for they affirm, that the early inhabitants of the lower Euphrates were of the same stock with the primitive colonists both of Arabia and of the African Ethiopia; and Sir H. Rawlinson states, that the old Babylonian vocabulary is undoubtedly Cushite or Ethiopian,' and corresponds, to a surprising extent, with those ancient languages, 'of which we have the purest modern specimens in the Mahra of Southern Arabia, and the Galla of Abyssinia.' Another disputed point in the Mosaic ethnology is the alleged descent of the Canaanites from Ham. Bunsen denies the fact very positively in his Philosophy of History, and maintains that they were Semites. But the arrow-heads strike him again. The Canaanites, as they represent them, were a 'Scythic or Hamite people of the same blood with the Egyptians, Ethiopians, and Libyans,' the Khatta, or Hittites of Scripture, being their chief tribe, and the Aramæans, Jews, and Phoenicians being 'Semitic immigrants,' who gradually mixed up with them. It is remarkable, too, that the inscriptions endorse the account which verses 10 and 11 give of the founding of the metropolis of Assyria. 'Out of that land,' namely, Shinar, or Lower Babylonia, 'went forth Asshur, and builded Nineveh.' And this is the testimony of our newly risen witnesses. They furnish, as Mr. Rawlinson tells us, 'distinct evidence of the early predominance of Babylonia over Assyria, of the spread of population and civilization northwards, and of the comparatively late founding of Nineveh.' Last of all, so far as this part of the sacred records is concerned, the cuneiform writings confirm and illustrate the geography of Moses by the identifications which they have enabled us to make of the sites of certain ancient cities of the basin of the Mesopotamian rivers. 'Babel and Erech and Accad in the land of Shinar; and, in the adopted country of Asshur, 'Nineveh and the city Rehoboth and Calah and Resen;'-what pangs of criticism have not been suffered over these names! But here they are,

some of them at least, on bricks, which their inhabitants dried in the sun or the kiln centuries before Homer rhapsodized, or the she-wolf lapped the overflowing of the Tiber. We need not be told where Babel was, 'the glory of the Chaldees' excellency.' Erech, it can hardly be doubted, is Warka, 'the city,' as the inscriptions on the spot emphatically style it; a mass of shapeless, lichened ruin-mounds, girded with swamps, some hundred and twenty miles S.E. of Babylon, and described with almost affecting picturesqueness by Mr. Loftus in his valuable book on Chaldæa and Susiana. Kinzi Accad, of which the monuments in this same region speak, is in all probability the Accad of Moses, though the site is at present undetermined. Calneh, the Nopher of the Talmud, appears to be the modern Niffer, which lies some sixty miles from Babylon, in the direction of Warka, about halfway between the Tigris and Euphrates. The bricks on the spot give it a name which seems to be equivalent to Calneh, Tel Anu, or Noah's Hill. All these belong to the district called in the inscriptions Sinkareh, a name in which it requires no philologist's spectacles to see the Shinghar or Shinar of Genesis. As to the other group of names, Nineveh is well known to be represented by less or more of that huge outspread of ruins in the fork of the Tigris and the Greater Zab, to which Koyunjik and Khorsábád belong. Nimrúd, near the junction of the streams, is almost certainly the Scripture Calah; while Resen has been identified with the vast ruins of Kaleh Sherghát, a little above the union of the Lesser Zab and the Tigris.

We have already spoken of Múgeyer on the right bank of the Euphrates, not far from its junction with the Shat-el-Hie, as that Ur of the Chaldees'-Húr the name reads on the bricks and cylinders-where the God of glory first appeared to Abraham. Some of the oldest Babylonian inscriptions yet known, inscriptions dating as far back perhaps as the twenty-second century B.C., have been met with on this sacred site. Nearly midway between Múgeyer and Warka is Senkereh, the modern representative of another ancient Chaldean city, the Ellasar of which Arioch was King in the days of Abraham. This name naturally brings in another. What should we think of finding memorials of Arioch's military confederate and superior, 'Chedorlaomer, King of Elam,' within a few miles of Senkereh? Such appears to be the fact. The bricks and cylinders of Múgeyer furnish us with a list of Babylonian Monarchs, beginning with Urukh, B.C. 2230, and ending with Nabonidus, B.C. 540. 'about the date which, from Scripture, we should assign to Chedorlaomer,' namely, early in the twentieth century B.C., there is a break in the series; and, while Elam, or Elymais, is

At

Chedorlaomer and Cushan Rishathaim.

6

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pointed to as the source of the interruption, a King Kudurmabuk, as his name is read, who further bears the significant title of Apda Martu, or Ravager of the West,' is represented as being paramount in Babylonia at this period. And when we add to this the positive assurance of Sir H. Rawlinson, that Mabuk in Hamitic Babylonian is the exact counterpart of the Semitic Laomer, and find, moreover, that Berosus's list of the Babylonian Sovereigns exhibits a gap at this very same point in the chronology, we must confess to a cluster of coincidences in favour of the identity of the names, and of the truth of the Scripture history, which it requires either great learning or great boldness to treat as if they were nothing.

From Chedorlaomer we pass to the days of the Israelitish Judges, a space of several centuries, and one that embraces some of the most important events of Old Testament history. As to the whole of this period the cuneiform inscriptions, so far as we are acquainted with them, are entirely silent. And it would be strange if it were otherwise; for neither Babylonia nor Assyria had any political influence beyond the Euphrates till long after Israel had taken possession of the land of its inheritance. At the time of which we now proceed to speak, however, the Book of Judges represents the Israelites as delivered for their sins into the hands of Cushan Rishathaim, King of Aram-Naharaim, or Northern Mesopotamia. Is this credible? Is there not a mistake? A powerful prince, ruling some fourteen or fifteen hundred years B.C., side by side with Assyria! Bunsen declares it impossible. There can never have been an empire,' he says, in Eastern Syria co-existent with Assyria and Babylonia.' But let us wait a moment. The cuneiform records of a hundred years or two after Cushan Rishathaim distinctly show that even then the Assyrians were not masters of the whole of the country between the two rivers; and we have every reason to believe, that the monarchy of Assyria was scarcely out of its cradle, when Othniel 'judged Israel, and went out to war' against its oppressor. Which shall we receive then, the witness of the Book of Judges and the Assyrians themselves on the one side, or the affirmation of this erudite, philosophical, brilliant, and, we are bound to add, most rash writer of à priori history on the other? In all probability, it was not till the beginning of the twelfth century B.C. that Assyria made any conquests west of the Euphrates; and, though Tiglath Pileser I., towards the middle of the same century, tells us he had 'subjugated all the earth,' his world ended by his own showing with the Kurdish Mountains, Armenia, Cappadocia, and Upper Syria about Carchemish.

During the hundred and fifty years that followed the reign of the Monarch last mentioned, Assyria seems to have extended her dominion further and further among her neighbours; and, from the time of the formation of the separate kingdoms of Judah and Israel down to the Babylonish captivity, the Assyrian inscriptions afford us numerous verifications of the truth of the sacred history. The first of these is found in connexion with the account which the First Book of Kings gives us of the war between the Syrians of Damascus and the Israelites in the latter part of the reign of Ahab. The celebrated black obelisk from Nimrúd is our authority; and though it makes no mention of the Israelitish King, or even of the struggle between him and Benhadad, 'it affords us,' to use the words of Mr. Rawlinson,—

'a very curious and valuable confirmation of the power of Damascus at this time-of its being under the rule of a Monarch named Benhadad, who was at the head of a great confederacy of princes, and who was able to bring into the field year after year vast armies, with which he repeatedly engaged the whole forces of Assyria. We have accounts of three campaigns between the Assyrians on the one side and the Syrians, Hittites, Hamathites, and Phoenicians on the other, in which the contest is maintained with spirit, the armies being of a large size, and their composition and character such as we find described in Scripture. The same record further verifies the historical accuracy of the Books of Kings by a mention of Hazael as King of Damascus immediately after Ben-hadad, and also by the synchronism which it establishes between this prince and Jehu, who is the first Israelite King mentioned by name on any inscription hitherto discovered.'

For a hundred years after Jehu, or Yahua, as the monuments call him, there is a great dearth of copious Assyrian inscriptions, and their silence as to all that took place beyond the Jordan is so much negative evidence in favour of Scripture; for the Hebrew annals touch no foreign country, of which we have any records at all, from the time of Jehu to that of Menahem.' With the reign of this latter prince, a little before Romulus laid his foundation-stone, we enter upon a period of frequent contact between Palestine and Assyria, and our cuneiform vouchers for the truth of holy writ begin to thicken. In the fifteenth chapter of the Second Book of Kings we read that Pul' [the LXX. call him Φαλώχ or Φαλώς] ' the King of Assyria came up against the land: and Menahem gave Pul a thousand talents of silver, that his hand might be with him to confirm the kingdom in his hand.' On this let us hear Mr. Rawlinson again.

The Assyrian records of the time present us with no name very close to this; but there is one which has been read variously as Phal